PRACTICEM Archives - Mindful Happiness

February 14, 2018 By Admin

Subtle and Direct Experiences of Happiness

Khenpo Sherab Zangpo’s 2017 publication The Path: A Guide to Happiness, Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications has much to offer about how to become a happier person. Read over the listing below and see what you may be missing.

Try this mantra: “I am happy the way I am.” “I am happy with what I have now.” Remember: “You can’t always get what you want.” “All you/we need is love.”
Long-term transformational happiness requires many years of mindfulness practice via meditation and yoga. It requires that you not succumb to the habit of judging all experiences as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. It requires that you radically accept your suffering, and that you fully enjoy your happiness – but without trying to hold on to it. You cannot avoid suffering, and you cannot hold on to joy and happiness. Just BE with it.
Since happiness is largely a state of mind, it is true that it is an inside job.
Let go of rigid attachments/desires/cravings for sensory pleasures. Let go of endless efforts to avoid suffering and pain. You cannot do it! Practice fully experiencing life, the good, the bad, and the neutral. Detach from greed, pride, ego-accomplishments, and craved relationships. Practice being satisfied!
Practice calm abiding when engaged in awareness of mind, body, feelings/sensations, and consciousness regarding all arising and falling phenomena in life. Get out of the endless cycle of partial satisfaction with short-term gains, and relief when suffering fails to reach you. Less is more here! Going with the flow of life is helpful.
Notice that all emotional moods, feelings, sensations are short-term in their arising and falling away. It is all about the totality of impermanence of all things, including our own lives. Stop wasting energy working to suppress and avoid suffering and pain. It will happen; when it does simply radically accept it and use wise mind skills for living.
Realize that along with impermanence, everything comes from dependent origination. Nothing arises of itself; there are always causes and conditions to the arising and falling away of all human experiences. Change is a constant!
Pure joy does occur. When you notice it simply enjoy it, with full knowledge that it too will change. Be content with it and allow it to enter your mind and body. Enjoy your joy; be one with your happiness.
Happiness occurs only in present moment awareness; it does not occur in past-mind or in future-mind. These are simply memories of the past and projections into the future. You have no control over the past; it has already happened. You have no control over the future; plan for it but know you do not control it. Accept!
Like happiness, suffering is also subject to impermanence; it changes in time. All things change in time.
You may activate the feeling of joy and appreciation when meditating or doing yoga outdoors in nature. Can you meditate and complete asanas with an attitude of joy inside yourself? Practice this! Be the joy!
Negative mood states of anger, jealousy, anxiety, depression, fear, and trauma need to be faced and radically accepted without activating unhelpful behaviors. Stop self-medicating in fruitless hopes that it will bring joy and end suffering. It will not! Make space for them rather than treating them as your enemy. Befriending via wise mind skills and calm abiding may lead to reduced impact on your emotions. You may even make these conditions your allies, all trying to teach you something that will help you do better, be better. Use self-compassion often.
When emotionally reactive, directly observe the process of your mind to understand why you are experiencing what you are experiencing. Recognize, allow, investigate and reduce impact on the self (RAIN process). Realize that in the end, the ultimate end, everything is empty. Be skilled. Be happier.
Practice mindfulness, mindfulness meditation, vipassana meditation, yoga, loving kindness, compassion, and gratitude. All these practices will help you.
Study the Four Noble Truths and The Eight Fold Path to understand all phenomena and yourself more deeply. Skills here will lead to greater internal, lasting happiness.
For those of you more involved in Buddhist Psychology, you may want to read Nagarjuna’s, Fundamentals of the Middle Way or Shantideva’s The Way of the Bodhisattva. May you have great success in learning how to be a happier person! There is much wisdom in these writings.

Anthony R. Quintiliani, PhD., LADC

From the Eleanor R. Liebman Center for Secular Meditation in Monkton, Vermont and the Home of The Monkton Sangha

Author of Mindful Happiness

New Edition of Mindful Happiness in Production…Coming soon!

What The Buddha Taught About Metta In the Metta Sutta (Anguttara Nikaya, 11:16) The Buddha said that we should seek the following characteristics in how we live our lives: Wholesome goodness; Gentle speech; Human Humility; Personal contentment; Personal calmness; and, Pure-heartedness in all we think, say, and do. By living this way we would be […]

Overcoming the Hindrances of Ill-Will and Aversion Although regular daily practice and sincerely following of The Eight-Fold Path in one’s life may be the best ways to overcome various hindrances, there may be some additional practical suggestions to consider on the path. We will begin our discussion with common human pain and suffering; we will […]

Failure and Success: After We Fail, We Succeed Humans tend to get very discouraged when things do not go our way. This may be especially true for younger people, who have grown up attached to their instant gratification digital devices. Below I will list several highly successful people, but I will also note their many […]

Setting Emotional Boundaries from Work to Life Anthony R. Quintiliani, Ph.D., LADC Sometimes setting emotional boundaries from the psychotherapy room to your life outside of work can be a difficult thing to do. Shifting from “experience near empathy” (Kohut), “unconditional positive regard” (Rogers), “hovering attention” (Freud), “the holding environment” in “intersubjective space” (Winnicott), and compassionate […]

Mindfulness Based Contemplations Best to practice both of these contemplations using the lectio divina method, that is each time you contemplate the content of the two messages concentrate a bit more, go a bit deeper into your mind. Concentrate! Concentrate! Concentrate! Go deeper into your mind to discover your answers. Contemplation 1 – Who Am I? If I […]

Gratitude Practices to Improve your Emotional Mood The following fourteen suggestions may improve your emotional mood. One reward from practicing gratitude is that we tend to feel a little better no matter what our causes and conditions are at the time. Here is the list. Make a habit of thanking people. “Thank you.” Appreciate […]

Tips on Practice During These Troubling Times Some people are religious, and I am sure turn to those sources for support and hope. Others are spiritual, and I hope also pursue those sources for emotional stability and closeness to the “their” divine. Other people may be Agnostic or Atheist; I am certain such people also […]

My third posting on self-medication- Comes from the Eleanor R. Liebman Center for Secular Meditation in Monkton, Vermont. Now we will turn our attention to how people become habituated to self-medication to obtain brief moments of joy and/or to avoid emotional suffering. Recall that self-medication becomes a habit (dopamine released in reward centers of the […]

More on Self-Compassion Practices Suffering and happiness represent opposites in human emotional experience. In our culture we often equate happiness with what we HAVE and suffering with the GAP between what we have versus what we want. Material possessions tend not to lead to intrinsic happiness; joy based on materials gains is often short-lived – […]

Practice: Yogi Deep Meditation on Inner Listening Carl Jung noted: Who looks outside dreams; who looks inside, awakens. The Katha Upanishads (800-400 BCE) noted: One path leads outward and the other inward. [The] way inward leads to grace. The Mind Cave Focus instructs us to close our eyes and expand your third-eye space to the back of […]

Reminders for Your Psychological and Physical Health If you desire to be more compassionate with others and with yourself, remember the following. Be certain to ACT on the following. 1) Life is complete only with joy/happiness, neutral experiences, and suffering/pain. These are the realities of human existence. These are the conditions of human life. Make […]

Zen Buddhist Practices – Egolessness In our practice we often inquire, and sometimes experience, the no-self and/or egolessness. What is egolessness? Who and what do we think we are? Some say that when we die the essence but not the ego lives on into new experiences. Karma and re-birth are givens in this spiritual view. […]

Using Creativity in Clinical Supervision Effective clinical supervision is a combination of hearable direction about clinical practice, gentle-direct leadership, clinical “Know-How,” evidence-based skills, complex psychodynamics, and the willingness to work with others on their developmental processes. There are risks involved. I have provided clinical supervision and consultation to other clinicians for 43 years without a […]

Vipassana Meditation -No-Self Journey 3 In this third vipassana meditation I will guide you on a meditation dealing with the experience of no-self. No-self is a highly advanced experience in Buddhist meditation and wisdom practices, and it is, perhaps, one of the most misunderstood concept and experience. Along with impermanence, dependent origination, typical reality […]

How to be Happier in a Relatively Unhappy World In today’s fast-paced, digitized, unstable world – with it uncertainty, childish tweets from on-high, and general dissatisfaction with things as they are – how may one become a happier person. It is clear that isolation will not work; it is clear that aggressive actions in opposition […]

Effective Clinical Supervision Perhaps other than the mental health status of the therapist and her/his ethical clinical skills, there is no more important variable in successful clinical work than effective CLINICAL supervision. I emphasize “clinical’ because in today’s bureaucratic systems, so much supervision tends to be about required procedures like utilization level, reporting requirements, and documentation for services […]

Concentration, Contentment, and Loving Kindness I have written various entries on concentration meditations in prior posts. Yes, concentration meditation is beyond pure mindfulness meditation. Here I will present briefly two other forms of meditation that are quite intentional and also beyond mindfulness: contentment and loving kindness meditations. Let’s begin with intentional meditation of contentment. Contentment […]

Liberate Yourself with Spiritual Energy Cultivating authentic inner and outer peace is the only way to a happy and good future. Learn to use your spiritual higher self to let go of self-centerednesss, greed, and entitlement. Work to free yourself from the endless grasping for material “things.” Does it really matter what kind of car […]

Risks and Solutions for Compassion Fatigue Perhaps nothing more than compassion fatigue causes more helpers to prematurely exit their fields. First responders are generally seen as the most at risk for compassion fatigue (and possibly PTSD), followed by emergency room medical staff. A third group, medical and clinical staff working with high risk terminally-prone patients is […]

Mindfulness Can Activate More Grace in Our Lives Today we all need to be cultivating more and deeper grace. Grace needs to be activated. Given so many of our cultural problems (murders and mass murders by gunfire, rampant personal and corporate greed, ego-entitlement, chronic stress, feelings of insecurity, technological advances that do not ADVANCE us, […]